“To the bus driver I said, ‘Culloden battlefield?’ and he replied, ‘Close enough.’ In front of me sat a woman with her hair rived up in black velvet roses and a glittering plastic butterfly. The bus lurched through hair-raising suburbs of Smithton: uniform housing coated in damaged stucco. Then the town of Culloden itself—a village of letterboxes and hair salons, like the rest of Scotland. Then—up, uphill—I felt great relief when the houses died away and the roadside grew greener and inward toward the roadway leaned birches.”

“Miserable pebble-stucco housing estates,” commiserates Mrs. Waugh. “Rubbish lining the roads. Cadbury purple foil chocolate wrappers I kept mistaking for crocuses. Hedges on whose twig-ends people have rammed pop bottles. And then the castle, which seemed friendly and did not appear haunted at first, began gathering about it a plethora of eyes and souls in its stone, wood and earth, watching and bearing influence on anyone foolish enough to stay. And so I couldn’t stay.”

“Where did you go? Did you have a tent, such as I had when I went?”

“I followed in your footsteps, and went to Culloden. En route at Inverness I found a bed and breakfast—it seemed promising on the outside. But inside, the administrator, a tough little woman, showed me through a sitting room she’d colonized with her bathrobe, her slippers, and newspaper spread over the couches, and not one but two programs broadcasting: football on the radio and a soap opera on television. My room, number ten, was up narrow back stairs. The key was so big and unwieldy I had to kneel on the floor to unlock the door. Fluorescent fire instructions glowed all night on the wall…and I had wet beans and tinned mushrooms for breakfast…and there were old people everywhere with walking-sticks…”

“And on a plinth behind the Culloden bus stop there’s a unicorn…”

“I saw that unicorn,” says Genevieve Waugh.

“…put there in case one had not realized that behind Scotland’s dour stodge there rises something else.”

“Deer,” says Mrs. Waugh. “Primroses. Old women hunched over trowels. Smoked haddock soufflé.”

“Gargoyles,” I correct her, “ancestral dryads.”

“I have a confession,” says Mrs. Waugh. “I didn’t want…at first, before I got to know him….I didn’t want Wolfe to be spindly and light. And I didn’t want him to fall in love with a woman who was like that—Elizabeth Lawson. Where was the fun in that? The hot-bloodedness? The passion?”

“I’m delicate in health. Anyone who writes about me has to accept that. Delicate not only in health, but in my whole person.”

“But when I go back to the letters—”

“My letters.”

“Well…They are clear and direct. Strong. Thoughtful and not impulsive—and in them is repeated a thing I like: Wolfe kept insisting that in at least part of every important decision one must leave something to risk, to chance.”